Monthly: April, 2014

I was taking a tour of Over The Rhine when the guide stopped us in front of a nondescript building. And when I say “nondescript,” I mean I can’t even remember what it looked like. It was just another neglected relic in that sadly forgotten part of our city. What I remember was what he said.

He told us that the Buffalo Bill Show had performed right at this spot. My mouth dropped open. I just stared and couldn’t believe my luck. NO WAY. I shoved my sister and said something like “I bet you don’t even know how awesome that is! ” She may have shoved me back and even if she did, I wouldn’t have noticed. I was lost in delighted reverie. I didn’t want to move.

To think that this decrepit fossil of a structure was on the site of the greatest Wild West Show in the world was nothing less than shocking and delightful at the exact same time. I imagined Annie Oakley herself, beautiful, petite, and dignified as she always was, gracefully nodding to her husband Frank as he set up her target. She would bring the gun to her shoulder, hardly even take a moment to aim, then BANG!! She never missed.

For those of you who, like my sister, have no idea how awesome Annie Oakley was, a bit of history:

Annie was 5 years old when her father got caught in a blizzard and died. Her mother couldn’t feed all of the children after that, so Annie had to go live with a family who abused her. Eventually she ran away from them by hopping on a train and found her way back home. But her mother still couldn’t feed her. So Annie took her father’s gun, went into the woods and taught herself to shoot. Bullets were too expensive to waste, so she never missed. She not only fed her family, she sold the game she shot and paid off the family farm. Her prowess earned her a reputation as the best shot in the county.

One day, a famous traveling marksman was in Cincinnati and heard about this shooter from Darke county. He decided to challenge this person to a contest, not knowing that he had just challenged a 15 year old girl. When she beat him, he fell in love with her. The make-believe Catniss Everdean has nothing on the real-life Annie Oakley.

If that tour guide hadn’t told me about what had happened in that place 130 years ago, I would have just walked on by. I wouldn’t have even looked twice. It’s practically tragic. And it happens all the time. But not on the Antiques Roadshow.

One time this lady brought in this statue to the Roadshow. It was her Grandma’s, I think. It was about 2 feet tall and halfway between a lion and a dragon. It’s mouth was wide open, showing all of it’s teeth, like it was saying “Ahhh” because it had a sore throat or was at the dentist. If my grandma had ever given me a statue like that, I would have shipped it off to Goodwill as soon as I had room in my car. I would have dropped it off and thanked that guy so many times for taking it off of my hands.

So the lady puts Ugly Dragon Guy up on the table, so Expert Man can tell her what he thinks of it. I’m at home mumbling, “I bet there’s a Goodwill dropoff center on the way home, lady,” into my ice cream. And then the Expert Man starts to talk. And he can barely get the words out because he is about to cry. And here’s the thing that just about knocked me and my ice cream off the couch: he didn’t start to cry because he thought it was so awful . He thought it was beautiful. He had never seen one as beautiful as this.

He turned it around gently, pointing out the inconspicuous details that revealed the remarkable skill of the artist. He knew when, where and why it had been sculpted. He understood what the image meant , both to the person who had created it, and the people for whom it was created. He was an Expert because he knew the story. And he cried because he loved the story.

And then he tells her it’s worth 250 thousand dollars. And I just dropped it off at Goodwill. Dangit.

I love the idea that we are surrounded by stories. A lot of them are bad. We don’t need to hear those. And we shouldn’t tell them. But the ones that are good – the ones that make you stop on the sidewalk and punch your sister – you should tell. And if an ugly dragon statue makes you cry, you should tell somebody why.

I was desperately trying to get my kids out the door of a friend’s house the other day. We were all having so much fun, but I had to get home to attempt some “social marketing.” Just as we were about to leave, I took out my phone and my friend asked if she and her kids could see Kalley’s Machine, our family’s first interactive story. Well, Ok, I guess.

Watching people react to Kalley’s Machine, for me, is very similar to watching them look at our family photo in the church directory a few years ago. When the church decided to do a photo directory, Jon happened to be in his “wads of cash” phase, where he held up money in every SINGLE picture that anyone took of him. Normally, he just posed with whatever cash he had in his pockets. Picture a white guy trying to look gangsta by holding up two dollars, while posing with a bride and groom. It was like that. All the time. But given the opportunity of an Olan Mills church photo shoot, he stopped at the bank to get ninety singles and a ten to wrap around them (because it was ‘all about the Hamiltons’). The bewildered lady taking our picture had to ask him several times to move the cash out of the baby’s face.

Later, when the church directory was published, there was quite a range of reactions to the “A” section: awkward silence, concern (“Um, Carrie, why is Jon is holding up money in your church picture?”), mild amusement, and occasionally, delight. We really just did it to make something mundane a little more colorful. But it also had the interesting side effect of tuning us in to kindred spirits who shared our opinion that church directory photos are a wonderfully unexplored medium for self-expression.

We’ve been trying to rethink our priorities as a family the last few years. And in light of those priorities, we’re experimenting with our lifestyle to see if we can shape it more instead of letting it shape us. RocketWagon is part of that experiment. We want to make meaningful stuff and spend more time together. We want our kids to learn some real-world artistic and business skills by being involved, even at their young ages.

However, experiments fail. We may find out sometime in the near future that we have spent an exorbitant amount of time, not on a financially viable business, but on a hobby. We love the idea of paying the bills by selling something that we have made together, but we may end up rudely awakened from that dream. Sometimes we wonder if the reason we don’t see many other people doing this is that it simply doesn’t work. Sometimes we wonder what on earth we are doing. And it’s a little scary.

That’s why it was so refreshing the other day when I pulled out my phone, showed it to my friend, and didn’t even have to explain. She got it. Her face lit up. I didn’t have to tell her why this little interactive story is part of a bigger dream. She understood because she has a similar dreams. We may be crazy. But it’s good to know that we are not alone.

It makes me wonder what her church directory picture looks like.

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